Banned Bytes / Who's Really Thinking Of The Children?

Neil McAllister, Special to SF Gate

Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, March 27, 2001

Generally speaking, banning books still has a rather poor reputation in America. Order librarians to remove copies of "Lolita" from their shelves, for example, and you can expect holy hell to be duly raised -- never mind that Nabokov's protagonist is a pedophile.

But the new media have had a much rougher time in recent years. Movies, television and even video games all have been forced to submit to various ratings schemes designed to categorize and castigate their content.

Bring the new media into libraries -- especially that notorious haven for pedophiles, the Internet -- and suddenly even our most sacred academic institutions become fair game for politicians and lobbyists. Case in point: the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), due to take effect April 20.

CIPA, which snuck in under the public radar as part of a congressional spending bill and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in December of last year, aims to do what no ratings system has yet been empowered to do. It won't just tell you what's good and what's bad; it will block access to the "bad" altogether.

President Trump addresses nation after mass shooting at Florida SchoolWhite House

CIPA requires that schools and libraries install filtering software on all their computers having a connection to the Internet. The idea is to prevent users from accessing content deemed "obscene." That means ALL users -- children, adults, staff members or anyone else. No computer is exempt. CIPA's backers, including Republican Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain, R-Ariz., say the law is about "protection." But the American Library Association (ALA) uses another word: censorship.

"It is the mission of libraries to provide access to the broadest range of information for a community of diverse individuals," said ALA President Nancy Kranich in a news release. "If the same standards used in online filters were applied to a library's books the way they are to the Internet, our shelves would be practically empty."

Of course, the federal government can't actually "make" your neighborhood library do anything. Libraries, like schools, traditionally fall under the jurisdiction of local communities. CIPA is instead offered up as a kind of "helpful suggestion," asking for voluntary compliance.

But institutions that fail to comply with the new law will lose access to federal funding. That includes the popular e-rate discounts on Internet access, as well as funding provided by the 1996 Library Services and Technology Act.

Currently, the federal government dedicates some $2 billion per year to providing computers and Internet connectivity to schools and libraries. But soon, access to those funds will be restricted to institutions that conform to the new law.

Sadly, this dubious brand of "voluntary compliance" has begun enjoying wide bipartisan support from government officials in recent years. Former Vice President Al Gore, a Democrat, tried to wash his hands of culpability for censorship when he backed the V-chip television-filtering scheme in Congress. After all, he claimed, broadcaster compliance with the V-chip technology would merely be a suggestion, not a requirement.

But what Al Gore calls voluntary compliance, I call extortion. Students of history will observe that it's awfully hard to say "no" to this kind of "suggestion."

We need only look to the private sector to see countless examples of how difficult it can be to avoid institutional censorship by so-called "voluntary" organizations. Films that don't pass the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system, for example, don't get distributed; and sometimes they can't get made at all.

Similarly, in the 1950s, comic book publishers voluntarily created the Comics Code Authority to control the content in their magazines. Only top publisher Entertaining Comics refused to submit to Code labeling. As a result, its popular magazines, including "Tales From the Crypt," were effectively banned from store racks by distributors who feared parental backlash. (Some industry historians suspect that toppling the market leader was the Comics Code's true purpose from the beginning.)

Basically, if you want your kids to have computers in their schools, you had better get used to CIPA. And that means you'd better get used to the idea of public Internet usage being controlled by corporations. Because after all, the federal government doesn't write filtering software. Libraries will have to license a system offered by a private software company.

Finding out exactly which sites are blocked by a given piece of filtering software can be problematic, since most vendors consider their "blacklists" to be proprietary information. That, too, should raise a red flag, says the ALA. Do we really want the standards by which a federal law will be applied to be decided by a commercial software vendor, rather than by a legislative body whose judgments are open to public review?

CIPA's opponents hope it's not too late to do something about it, claiming the law goes against both the principles of our education system and the very Constitution itself. Both the ALA and the ACLU have filed suit to block CIPA from taking effect.

Still, they may be fighting an uphill battle. According to the conservative Family Research Council, a top supporter of CIPA, allowing access without filtering leaves kids open to "virtual peep shows ... funded by taxpayers." And many American parents seem to echo those feelings, as well as the will to do something about it.

Along with the United Kingdom, the United States currently leads the Western world in efforts to place restrictions on youth Internet access. Market Research Group Ipsos-Reid's study of Internet users ages 12-24 showed 19 percent of American respondents already had their usage limited by filtering software at home. That's compared to 4 percent of those surveyed in France, 3 percent in Italy and Sweden, and 2 percent in the Netherlands.

This level of support for Internet filters in America is baffling, since there's little evidence to support the claim that filters really work. CIPA's opponents argue that filtering gives parents a false sense of security, since it can't possibly block every potentially offensive site on the Internet.

Napster's recent attempts to filter out copyrighted song titles can be taken as one example. It was widely reported that the filters could be defeated as simply as by translating MP3 filenames into Pig Latin.

Even worse are cases where filters block material they shouldn't. Generally speaking, Internet filters are designed to block sites containing words such as "breasts" or "sex." True, these catch most sexually explicit sites; but sites containing medical information, particularly pregnancy advice, are also hit. Additionally, sites offering advice for gay and lesbian youth are often frequent targets of filtering.

Oregon Republican Jeffrey Pollock was once a supporter of filtering software. He changed his tune, however, when he learned that the Web site promoting his 2000 congressional campaign was being blocked by one popular filtering program. Evidently the site, which railed against such societal ills as premarital sex and teenage pregnancy, was tagged as containing sexually explicit content. Today, Pollock ranks among CIPA's staunchest opponents.

For the federal government to put pressure on schools and libraries to filter the Internet is far more insidious than the MPAA or other rating schemes for entertainment media, because the Internet is far more than just an entertainment medium.

A 1999 study by Greenfield Online found that nearly 55 percent of American kids ages 11 and older use the Internet for schoolwork. Clearly, educational reliance on computers is increasing. But not every family with school-age children can afford a PC at home. And remember: When it comes to libraries, CIPA's restrictions apply to children and adults alike.

"Forcing libraries to choose between funding and censorship means millions of library users will lose," says the ALA's Kranich in a news release, "particularly those in the most poverty-stricken and geographically isolated areas in the country."

Ultimately, the real effects of CIPA won't be the protection of children, but limiting of the public's access to information and a deepening of the so-called Digital Divide.

And so, to the supporters of this unconscionable law, I say this: Please, won't somebody think of the children?

Neil McAllister is a writer, Internet developer, and technology consultant based in San Francisco. He hasn't forgotten Tipper Gore and her PMRC. nmcallister@sfgate.com